What are our chances?
So a bit of backstory first.
I am from a Schengen country (The Netherlands) and I have a girlfriend from the Philippines that wants to visit here to see the country and meet my family.
I have visited her before but we wanted her to visit my home country as well. Thus we applied for a Schengen visa, which was then denied for several reasons, but as far as I know the main reason is “We don’t trust you will go back to your home country”. This of course sucks, but I get it needs to be strict. We were looking to reapply but refrained from it. We thought it would be better to build our case and not waste money to just get another rejection on her name.
It didn’t help the situation that I did not exactly know what her part of the paperwork looked like exactly, which is why I can’t pinpoint a problem. What is good to know is that I both had sponsorship and accommodation papers for her and she applied under a friends & family visa. I have heard that needing a sponsorship is a big red flag, which I do understand, but she literally does not have the money to support herself in the country here, and she likely wont have that in the near future either, so we had no other option. Since they give us the option to sponsor I would assume thats a valid way of applying.
Also the main purpose of the visit was just getting to know everyone and everything here, so aside from a few set plans the itinerary was not really specific at all (we applied for 2 months visit).
Now on to the present:
The next plan is for us to meet in Asia somewhere at the end of the year for a week or 2. Then after that we want to apply for a visa again around the start of 2027.
For our case, these are the main changes that are currently in my head:
* she now owns her own small business (started recently), which we were told we hopefully can use to tell the embassy “I need to get back go my home country because i have a business there”. She did not start her business just for visa purposes but hopefully it can help?
* we have visited each other again (building our proof of relationship) and she has one more “visited another country and didn’t overstay” on her record, which will then be a total of 3 international travels
* we will buy real flight tickets this time (previously were dummy tickets as far as i am aware)
* I don’t know the exact length of her stay that we want to apply for, but if chances of approval are higher if it is less time then maybe im thinking of 1 month instead of 2
* I will most likely get approval from my work to work abroad in the philippines for a few weeks. the idea is to get the approval, book the flight tickets for her, and also book my flight tickets to the philippines on the same flight as her return would be. this hopefully shows the embassy she will actually return to her country since i will also go there with her and actually bought flight tickets + have work approval already
* we will still need to do the sponsorship + accomodation
so based on this information, what chance do you all think we have? is it worth applying again once the time comes?